The Victory Boogie Woogie painting by Mondrian is clearly inspired by the busy streets and urban blocks of Manhattan. In her recent 3d printed series of MyMondrian Ilona Lénárd pushes Mondrian’s last unfinished painting into the third dimension, therewith evoking the image of urban blocks and street canyons.

The colour fields of the Victory Boogie Woogie are translated using Rhino / Grasshopper visual programming into different heights for the smaller and bigger squares. The path of the 3d printing head is designed to randomly wiggle and sway along its course as to avoid a too clinical build-up of the layers.

The first 3d printed version is the MyMondrian Black, produced by 3D Robot Printing in Rotterdam. A black polypropylene mix is pumped into the printed end-effector of a big robot arm, which printed layer for layer the large work of art in a number of pieces that fit together to form the whole.

For the printing procedure pure gcode was written by ONL / Hyperbody alumnus Arwin Hidding, therewith bypassing proprietary firmware with its built-in limitations how to operate the robot arm. The challenge set by the artist directly inspired a technical innovation in 3d robotic printing !

The year 2017 is the Mondrian year, celebrating 100 years of De Stijl. Having lived and worked in the studio Theo van Doesburg in 1988-89, Ilona Lénárd feels emotionally connected to the work of Piet Mondrian of De Stijl movement, especially to his latest work the Victory Boogie Woogie.

The Victory Boogie Woogie painting by Mondrian is clearly inspired by the busy streets and urban blocks of Manhattan. In her new series of the Jacquard woven tapestries MyMondrian Ilona Lénárd pushes Mondrian’s last unfinished painting into the third dimension, therewith evoking the image of urban blocks and street canyons. The colour fields of the Victory Boogie Woogie are translated using displacement mapping technique into different shades of gray.

The MyMondrian wall tapestries have exactly the same dimensions as the original Victory Boogie Boogie, 127 x 127 cm, diagonally positioned.

MyMondrian Day and Night are on show at Design Days Dubai in Design District D3 from 13-17 March 2017, presented by the Dutch Creative Industry [DCI], and at the Salone del Mobile from 4-9 April, presented by Masterly at the Palazzo Francesco Turati in the center of Milan.

My Omniverse Jacquard woven fabric has been applied in the soft fabric inlays for the Body Chair, designed by Kas Oosterhuis. The Omniverse fabric was cut into sixteen triangular pieces and wrapped around the inlays as to create a soft feel for the Body Chair.

During Beirut Design Week I showed two of my Jacquard woven tapestries, Omniverse #1 and Omniverse #2. The show was part of the Partners International Business [PIB] program supported by the Dutch Creative Industry [DCI]. Beirut was a very positive experience, a much more pleasant city than I expected. Although according to the Dutch Ambassador Hester Somsen the militia are unpredictable and may fight each other any moment, adding more bullet holes into the abandoned buildings, the general atmosphere in Beirut city was good and forward looking. The designer community is coming alive and is gaining momentum, especially with respect to sustainability and the relevance of design for the public realm.

my Omniverse tapestries in the back of the exhibition space at the KED

During the design week I established a good contact with the famous carpet shop Iwan Maktabi and its present owner Mohamed Maktabi. Also we got to know his cousin Hadi Maktabi, also a carpet designer and carpet dealer. I will participate again with new work next year for the Beirut Design Week 2017 and 2018, again as part of the DCI.

My assistant Ghida and me in front of my Omniverse tapestriesunloading my crate in front to the KED venue

During Design Days Dubai 2016 from 13 to 19 March I showed two carpets designs of my series of FLOW carpets, the black and white carpet and the full colour carpet [16 colours]. The carpets were shown in booth G18 of the Dutch Creative Industry, adjacent to Marcel Wanders’s presentation.

Design Days Dubai 2016 | Flow carpet as seen from Marcel Wanders’ booth

Powerlines is the leading theme for my autonomous paintings. The large canvases bear names like TANGLE series, TWIG series, FLOW series, UP series, FOLD series, LOOP series. At Gallery Frank Taal I exhibit my most recent works the Omniverse series. Large canvases of 200x180cm resp 190x180cm are built up of multi layered intuitive gestures, using the acrylic markers to paint on the canvases. The canvas is on the foor af my studio, I approach the painting from all sides, thus building a seemingly weightless personal universe. When the viewer approaches the painting [s]he is sucked into this universe, by seeing more and more detail. On closer inspection one sees the splashes fly off the canvas. The viewer becomes aware of the speed and the force of the intuitive explosive gestures. The speed of my gestures on the canvas is faster than I can think, thus surprising my unimaginable self with the unpredictability of my fast and furious abstract calligraphic traces.